Famous Adopted People

Adoptees Lisa and Mindy are best friends whose childhood hobby of collecting the biographies of famous adopted people has continued into adulthood, even as their lives take different paths. Now in their late twenties, Mindy convinces Lisa to meet in South Korea to search for their birth mothers. But Lisa isn’t in a good place. She's been teaching English in Japan and the situation there—thanks mostly to her spontaneous, hard-partying ways—has become problematic.After a possible friendship-ending fight with Mindy in Seoul, and with a return to Japan no longer advisable, Lisa is running out of options. Refusing to come to terms with her life, she embarks on a drinking binge with Harrison, the almost supernaturally handsome fixer from the Motherfinder’s agency. Things quickly go from drunken to surreal; and Lisa wakes up to find herself trapped inside a palatial mountain compound, the captive of a glamorous, surgically-enhanced blonde named Honey. Honey’s world is populated by a cast of international misfits—an Australian personal assistant, a Russian doctor, a Japanese chef among them—all loitering in extravagant imprisonment. Forced to come to terms with why she is there, Lisa must also confront Honey’s true identity, and the fact that all of this can only be happening in one place: North Korea.Debut novelist Alice Stephens combines dark humor and a keen wit to examine the profound implications of not knowing where you come from; and how our perceptions of an unknown world actually reflect deeper truths about our own.

Alice Stephens was born in Korea and came to the United States as one of the first generation of interracial adoptees. Her work has appeared in Urban Mozaik, Flung, Banana Writers, and the Washington Independent Review of Books, which publishes her monthly column, Alice in Wordland. She has lived and studied on four continents, and the one constant in her life, besides writing, has been travel. Famous Adopted People is her debut novel. She currently lives in Washington, D.C.